"die of famine" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to people who have died due to a lack of food availability. For example, "In the early 19th century, many Irish people died of famine during the potato blight."
I won't die of famine today.
Millions die of famine – does that make for less poverty ?
Collingham describes how Britain pulled together to stay fed at home, even as its officials let a million and a half Bengalis die of famine.
The invention of artificial nitrogen fertilizer, followed by Green Revolution crops genetically bred to produce much more grain per stalk, meant that rather than die of famine, people lived to beget more people, who in turn begat even more.
(A 2008 MHR&C study described one lonely pilgrim who was found, emaciated and helpless, on a street bench. God apparently told her to "die of famine on the streets of Jerusalem". By the time she started to doubt her instructions, she was too weak to ask for help).
It is a regime under which 30 million died of famine between 1958 and 1960 alone'to say nothing of the millions of others put to death as enemies of the state.
The Sahel was in the midst of a devastating long-term drought: close to a million people died of famine between 1972 and 1984, prompting huge shipments of Western aid.
The sprawling Kumsusan Palace, its mausoleum lined with expensive marble, is thought to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, factoring in extensive renovations and an expansion during the 1990s, when tens of thousands of North Koreans died of famine.
Mr. Kim, who has kept his people in isolation and fearful of prison gulags, has outlived previous predictions of the collapse of his government, even after an estimated two million North Koreans died of famine in the mid-1990s.
As one contemporary observer wrote, "Insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England".
That many died of famine due to forced collectivisation in Ukraine and elsewhere in 1928-33, in deportations of entire peoples later, or, at all times, in inhuman labour camps, rather than by overt execution, lessens his guilt not a jot.
